A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

The beans are starting to turn red in La Cuchilla, Santa Rita This is the time of year when Honduran coffee growers find out what price they can expect for their beans when the harvest starts in November. And right now, the news looks pretty good. The current international price for Honduran coffee beans is $161 per quintale - 100 pounds.  My co-workers at the Comisión de Acción Social Menonita tell me the make-or-break-it point for the small producers around Copan is $150 a quintale . So getting $11 more is happy news indeed, especially after the bad year local producers had in 2011. That’s the thing with coffee as your only cash crop: You just never know. There used to be a marketing board of sorts for coffee that kept prices more predictable, but that ended in 2001. Prices now fluctuate from year to year, creating booms and busts for coffee growers. The big growers ride out the highs and lows. But for small producers a dip in prices makes the difference between ea...

Tearing apart the old bathroom  I once made the horrible mistake of buying glue traps to deal with a mouse problem. I got up the next morning to the unforgettable sight of a poor dead mouse that had gotten his little paw stuck first, then another paw, then the side of his face. I'm starting to suspect the water project at the children's home here in Copan might be angry mouse spirits getting back at me for that wrong deed. Every thing I touch up there just seems to stick me tighter into the glue. The plan was for new bathrooms and a big new water tank so that the Angelitos Felices foster home had decent basic services for the 30 or so children who live there. The mason who took on the project told me he'd have it done in 15 days. A little over three weeks into the project, the bathrooms are done and the tank's in place, sitting atop a nicely reinforced concrete floor to avoid any risk of 5,000 pounds of water crashing down on sleeping children in the room below...

I come from a land where you get a parking ticket if your tires are deemed to be too far from the curb. For a while it was illegal to make balloon animals in downtown Victoria, and just this summer the city launched a court battle to stop a woman from taping little posters to telephone poles advertising her cleaning service.  So it has been very enlightening to move to a place where you are essentially free to do whatever you want.  The street dogs howl at midnight. The possibly deaf neighbour across the way blasts his radio into the street at 5 a.m.The sidewalk food vendors sell their wares with no fear that a health inspector will ever come by.  One day I watched a kid digging a huge hole in the asphalt road in front of his house - the main road into town - to get at a broken water pipe. Nobody blinked. You can herd your cattle along the highway, stop your car dead in the middle of a skinny side street to have a conversation with an acquaintance, and make bal...

Corn-field clearcuts around Santa Rita, Copan What would bring 20 busy coffee producers out to a mid-day meeting on watersheds? The realization that if there's a solution for what's happening to the water supply on their fincas, it will have to come from them. The meeting was the first in what sounds like a long, slow process to have the Marroquin watershed in the hills above Santa Rita, Copan, declared a protected area. Some 16,000 families rely on the water that flows from this area. But climate change and the dramatic loss of forest has taken a toll. One producer at the meeting - organized by Honduran NGOs and regional groups working on such problems -  figures his water supply is half of what it was a few years ago. That's a scary development in a country where access to water for crops and consumption is still far from a given in rural communities. Much has been made in the international press about the loss of forests in Honduras. In the last four years the co...

The road that convinced me to get out and walk Before we left Canada in January, Cuso International asked us to watch a 90-minute video presentation on health concerns put together by Dr. Mark Wise, Cuso's doctor in residence. He listed what seemed like a hundred different health problems to watch out for in our international placements, from malaria and dengue fever to chagas and rabid dogs. He ended it with a humorous little lecture noting that even if we couldn't be bothered to wear mosquito repellent - even if we insisted on patting stray dogs -  at the very least we should always use a seatbelt when riding in a vehicle, because car accidents are by far the most common bad things to happen to Cuso volunteers. I think back on his advice with a rueful smile whenever I'm jouncing along any of the truly terrible roads in Honduras. If only it were that easy, Dr. Wise. Sure, I do up my seatbelt if I happen to be sitting in the front seat of somebody's vehicle. B...